PUBLIC HEALTH AND MEDICAL CARE FOR THE COMMUNITY AND THE INDIVIDUAL

The term "health services" has been so generally used in this and previous Rural Health Conferences to describe or refer to organized provision for the sick that the true meaning of public health services has been quite overlooked or entirely disregarded. Medical care of the sick is, of course, the primary object of the practice of personal and family medicine, the relief of suffering, pain, disability, anxiety, and fear of death being the purpose of diagnosis and treatment by the physician. In spite of irregular or uneven distribution of physicians to the disadvantage of small, scattered rural population groups as compared with large cities and metropolitan populations, there are but few of our people who cannot obtain medical care of good quality. No other nation has so liberal a ratio of physicians and hospital beds in proportion to the population at large as we have, and these ratios are steadily